Details

Date Published

Date Built

CPU Clock Rate

CPU Temperature While Idle

23.0° C

CPU Temperature Under Load

57.0° C

GPU Core Clock Rate

900 MHz

GPU Effective Memory Clock Rate

1.05 GHz

GPU Temperature While Idle

50.0° C

GPU Temperature Under Load

72.0° C

Description

With the help of friends, this build was put together to be used for school, rendering, game recording, gaming, and pretty much everything else. This was my first build, so I wasn't really sure what I was doing.
"What's this part do? What about this thingy? Oooohhh shiny thingy over there!"

So far so good, my only problem is that the mobo doesn't OC well/is a little wobbly in it's clock rate/voltages of the CPU.

Note: The CPU has been OC'd to 3.8GHz. The temperatures reflect the OC'd temps, not the stock temps.

Note #2: The GPU was a gift from a friend. I don't have a ton of background info on it (in fact, it seems like every page containing info on it has been erased). Since getting it, I have replaced the thermal compound on it, and the temperatures reflect post thermal compound replacement.

Motherboard

Positives: It works very well. Not a lot of capacitors for the CPU, overclockers beware. It works, haven't had any non-user-induced issues.

Negatives: Not for overclocking. As I'm writing this the voltage shown on HWMonitor is bouncing from 1.264 to 1.256 rapidly. Not due to temps, everything is very cool right now. The clock rate on the CPU also fluctuates (for no apparent reason?) from time to time, again not due to temps.
Due to the naive overclock, I messed up the thermal throttling and had to clear the CMOS, which seemed to fix it. Still, though. I'd prefer it a lot more if it had one less power phase for two or more capacitors.

Storage

A lot of people seem to have a lot of DOA's for WD. (Same for Seagate), and I think it just depends on where you are and where the hard drive comes from.
Anyway, love the hard drive, no problems yet.
...Except...
Can't remember if this was present at the first boot, but there's a fairly loud sound of the drive spinning up - reminds me of the DVD drive in my laptop - when the computer starts. Really wish I could rate 4.5 stars, since I don't know if this exists for other drives, and it isn't worth taking away a whole star.

Video Card

Nearly five(?) years after release, this thing refuses to go down without a fight. Rocking that 1050MHz memory clock, along with the 300MHz core clock (boost 900), it can handle max Gmod settings, Subnautica on recommended, Arma 2 on medium settings (some things tweaked a bit).
I find keeping shadows off/low REALLY helps. Nothing else bogs this card down than shadows, even AA.

Case

Aside from the fan colors being my favorite color (blue), this case has room for cable management, has high quality hard drive cages, and rocks some sweet blue LEDs.

The reasons for the four stars is that the case itself is semi-cheap. I (pretty easily) bent one of the things that keeps the case sides on by accident, but just as easily bent it back. The power button is also semi-cheap, giving no real feedback that you actually pressed the button. You have to press the far right side of it for it to truly go down any. Not a huge bad thing, but considering the reset button gives excellent feedback, I'm not sure that this isn't caused by shipping damage or maybe just a bad unit. Everything else is wonderful, though!

Monitor

No BLB (Back light bleed), nice colors, very easy to adjust brightness/contrast. The other PCPartPicker review mentioned something about it only having VGA, which it doesn't. It does have VGA, but it also has HDMI. It comes with a VGA cable, but has VGA and HDMI connection options.

Protip: The screen tilting is very stiff the first handful of adjustments. Still a great monitor.

Comments
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Not sure about your motherboard in particular, but usually you want your gpu to be in the first pcie x16 slot just below the cpu, so that it gets maximum pcie lanes available.
Lower pcie slots usually work with fewer lanes (probably x4) so you could be missing some performance on the card :)
Oh, and I also suggest turning the cpu cooler around to blow air through it and to the top exhaust of the case, or you could just reseat that fan, your choiche but should make temperatures slightly better.

I think you are right, didn't notice that.
In the description there are just 2 sticks though, if I'm not missing anything from the text part.
If the sizes are mismatched though you can still get the full capacity and the dual channel architecture i.e. by putting two 4gb sticks in one channel and one 8gb stick in the other.

Well, hot air naturally rises, so even without an exhaust top fan it would be better to "help it go up" than blow it down against the pcb of the gpu.
My first option would be rotate the cooler 90° as you said blowing towards the back of the case, but I think with most of the AMD solution it is not possible.

+1 for the GPU :). But it is not 300MHz and boost to 900MHz. It's 900MHz and that 300 you see is the idle clock. The same happens to the CPU. For example the FX 6300 has a clock of 3.5GHz and when needed it boosts to 4.1GHz. But on idle it goes down to 1.4GHz. By the way nice to see old GPUs holding up. :):)